Racist movements exploit the tensions between democracy and nationalism and use the crisis to its advantage, as evident in the US and in India.

Speaking on immigrants to The New York Times in May 2016, the late Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman was reminded of the phrase by Bertolt Brecht: “harbingers of bad news”. He meant to say, immigrants “embody” a certain fear and anxiety in privileged inhabitants of a place, about losing one’s economic, cultural and therefore political place and status in the world. Refugees or migrants, Bauman explained, bring with them a certain insecurity regarding mysterious and obscure “global forces” that disturb the stable idea of a neighbourhood, a habitat. Hence the world’s resentment of dispossessed people, who are demonised, ironically, for what they do not possesses rather than what they do.

Though the US is a nation of immigrants with enough laws to protect their interests, the sentiment of self-preservation mixed with a racial discourse of hatred towards immigrants can twist and turn those laws to suit a new nationalist order of things. In India, the deliberate lack of a clear policy and ethical responsibility towards people forced to be refugees by Partition has kept the fate of these people forever tottering under the sword of Damascus. One can switch the two most popular slogans of the current regimes in India and the US to find what is clearly common between them: ‘Swachh America Abhiyan’ and ‘Make India Great Again’. The logic of exclusion works insidiously, combining prejudice with the promise of redemption. The idea of ‘swachh’ or ‘clean’ can work as a metaphor for cleaning up unwanted populations, which in turn is argued to usher in a glorious state of prosperity. There is a sleight-of-hand sidelining of democracy by using the rhetoric of nationalism, a Hegelian ‘cunning of reason’, where arguments are made to suit and justify selfish passions. The secular order of democracy can be shaken by that other buried language of history, where race and religious antagonisms prevail. Racist movements exploit the tensions between democracy and nationalism and use the crisis to its advantage.

Growing up in Assam in the late 1970s and 80s, I was witness to a communal movement that massacred the idea of home. As refugee families from erstwhile East Bengal, we were also identified as ‘foreigners’ by leaders of the Assam Movement who displayed great virtue in thrusting the vocabulary of colonial occupation upon a beleaguered people looking for a place to begin life anew. Some of these people belonging to the propertied class from the East of Bengal gained government jobs in the railways and elsewhere with little education. Their social and economic status ensured a degree of safety when the anti-foreigners movement begun in violent earnestness from 1979. To know as a young boy that one is a “foreigner” in one’s birthplace can be catastrophic. It not only severed my ties with the only place I could call home, but also the relation between land and people, people and territory, territory and language, language and belonging. Torchlight processions would pass by our homes, chanting slogans in Assamese like, ‘Will give blood; not country’, ‘Foreigners get out’. Since a blackout would be declared in the evening whenever a procession was planned, we had to watch them go by through dark windows of fear. The word ‘curfew’ would spread like the news of a prowling wolf, as we often left a game of football midway in a hurry to rush home. We were uncomfortably used to the idea of being protected by the police, for their presence reminded us we weren’t free. Imagine our sense of trust in the nation when every evening we had to tune in to the Bengali radio service of BBC and Voice of America to know the fate of people in other parts of the state, belonging to our community. All India Radio censored news with the logic of ‘not aggravating the situation’. Even the government wasn’t sending us reassurances except the central police force whenever things were going out of hand. We were out of place and out of favour.

There was a Life Insurance Company office building at the entrance of the sprawling market area in Guwahati, with its board reading, ‘Insure and be secure’. Bengali refugees had no insurance regarding their political status and were left to face the communally charged music in deep insecurity. But the desperation to be part of the national mainstream and having enough avenues to do so, made the Bengali Hindu middle class in Assam settle down to an apolitical existence after the Assam Accord was signed in 1984. The Nellie riots of February 18, 1983 that preceded the accord, where thousands of Muslim peasants were butchered in a few hours, and the gradual easing off in the relations between the Bengali and the Assamese middle class Hindus, ensured that Muslims alone would be relegated to the status of permanent, political refugees in the state. It perfectly suited the ‘acceptable’ communal divide in the nation. Bengali Hindus, who had faced persecution till the other day, had no qualms in abandoning the Muslims to their lone political fate. Refugees, who fail to grow in them a sense of solidarity and empathy for less fortunate and privileged others, are selfish and disappointing victims of history. The lure of communal nationalism and the logic of economic profit have enough power to divide victims.

One of the trickiest features of modern democracies is the fusion of the sacral and the natural. The reading of the Bible during the inauguration ceremony of a US president merges the secular idea of democracy with scriptural nationalism. Religious nationalism further sanctifies the idea of territory in sacral terms. Trump’s evocation of “forgotten people” is clearly not meant for the neglected working class or marginalised minorities. It is a nationalist and racist borrowing of the Jewish idea of ‘chosen people’. This makes migrants, refugees, become ‘natural’ outsiders, and as they fall outside the sacral idea of the nation, they are seen as less than human, a little more animal or insect like. The community suffers a narcissistic symptom where the other falls outside the discourse of love, thus ripe for hatred. In a memorable scene from Werner Herzog’s short film, The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreuz, a young man wearing a Second World War army uniform enjoys chasing a rat with a defunct gun. Hate is not just serious business, hate is a game. It is fun to scare away the insect who enters our territory by accident or fate. Treating others like insects adds a special charm to being a fascist.

Brad Evans, in his interview of Bauman, quoted from the British-Somalian poet Warsan Shire’s famous poem on refugees: ‘no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land.’ For a refugee, however, the trials of land are as slippery and treacherous as water. The central problem of refugees and migrants is perhaps the articulation of a language of seeking shelter without compromising their sense of dignity. But their dignity slips away the moment they enter someone else’s territory in a world where the very idea of the ‘human’ is marked by territorial sanctity. The human being as a territorialised animal seeking self-preservation needs to welcome the refugee for any possibility of his becoming human.

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is a poet, writer and political science scholar. He has recently contributed toWords Matter:Writings Against Silence, edited by K. Satchidanandan (Penguin, 2016). He is currently adjunct professor in the School of Culture and Creative Expressions at Ambedkar University, New Delhi.

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